James Tour: The Goalposts Are Racing Away | Evolution News

Again, interesting. But what are we to conclude from this? A crypto-creationism lurks in these exposes but that is clearly no answer. The design issue is transparent but has no explanation in science or religion. Clearly the answer involves a force category unknown to science, or cosmology which is perhaps the proper context. The cosmic level generated planetary systems and the result generates life. A naturalisitic explanation seems the obvious and only answer. But such a category doesn’t exist yet…

The issue resembles the same problem we find in the eonic effect: we see a beautiful design in history and probably this speaks to evolution also. But we confront a mystery force or energy that has creative force, and seemingly ‘intelligent’ action. And the supernatural simply doesn’t square with the gestalt shown.
The intelligent design inference is a telling mystery but to displace it into theology is the endless mistake of the whole gambit.

To reiterate, consider the eonic effect: origin of life? you ain’t seen nothing yet. Look at the eonic sequence for the Greek transition. We see a tremendously elusive creative force behind art, the birth of science, philosophy, politics, literature, etc…And yet we cannot indulge in theistic or supernatural explanations.
The irony here is that the both the Israelite and Hellenic transitions are analogous and isomorphic and the ‘god’ inference thus fails for both.

The problem, Tour says, is that some leading origin-of-life researchers give the impression they are right on the cusp of solving the problem.Not so, Tour says. He offers the analogy of someone claiming, in the year 1500, that he has the know-how to build a ship to travel to the moon, when no one yet knows even how to build an airplane, car, or car engine. Tour says that if he took a cell that had just died a moment before and asked top origin-of-life researchers to engineer it back to life, they couldn’t do it. They’re not even close to being able to do it. And yet all the ingredients, all the building blocks of life are right there, all in one place, in the right proportions. And not only can scientists not engineer those ingredients back to life, they still can’t synthesize even a fraction of the building blocks essential to cellular life, despite decades and millions of dollars poured into the problem. And yet they assume that purely blind material processes turned prebiotic chemicals into all the key building blocks, and then mindlessly engineered those into the first self-reproducing cell on the early Earth.